What happened in the sixties?

What happened in the sixties?

JON AGAR*

Abstract. In general history and popular culture, the long 1960s, a period roughly beginningin the mid-1950s and ending in the mid-1970s, has been held to be a period of change. Thispaper offers a model which captures something of the long 1960s as a period of ‘sea change’resulting from the interference of three waves. Wave One was an institutional dynamic thatdrew out experts from closed and hidden disagreement into situations where expert dis-agreement was open to public scrutiny. Wave One also accounts for the multiplication ofexperts. Wave Two consisted of social movements, institutions and audiences that could carrypublic scrutiny and provide a home for sea-change cultures. In particular, Wave Two providedthe stage, audience and agents to orchestrate a play of disagreeing experts. Wave Three wasmarked by an orientation towards the self, in diverse ways. Modern science studies is aphenomenon of Wave Three. All three waves must be understood in the context of the un-folding Cold War.

If we collect together and review the secondary literature on science and technology in

the 1960s, alongside general histories of the period, what patterns can be found? Can a

synthesis be made? What is clarified? What is obscured? What is left out? In the sci-ence-studies literature we lack sufficiently synthetic accounts,1 while the general his-

tories have barely begun to address science and technology, beyond a handful of

familiar topics: the pill, elite critical thought, television, the Apollo programme.2

This essay asks whether the ‘ long 1960s’ is a helpful category for historians of

science and technology. It sets out a ‘three-wave’ model that, I propose, captures much

of the best analysis from scholarship that has otherwise not been connected. Wave Oneis an institutional dynamic drawn from institutional history. Wave Two centres on

* Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS), University College London, Gower Street,

London, WC1E 6BT, UK. Email: [email protected].

Thanks to John Krige, Steve Bernardin, Matt Wisnioski, Peder Ankar, David Hollinger, Jerry Ravetz, PeterGalison, Charles Rosenberg, Kathryn Packer and Simon Schaffer; to colleagues in Manchester, Cambridge,

Harvard and University College London; and to the anonymous reviewers.

1 The best surveys are E. Mendelsohn, ‘The politics of pessimism: science and technology circa 1968’, in

Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism (ed. Y. Ezrahi, E. Mendelsohn and H. Segal), Amherst, 1994,151–73; J. R. Ravetz, ‘Orthodoxies, critiques and alternatives ’, in The Companion to the History of ModernScience (ed. R. Olby et al.), London, 1990, 898–908.2 For example, otherwise admirable texts such as D. Farber, The Age of Great Dreams, New York, 1994;

and his edited collection The Sixties: FromMemory to History, Chapel Hill, 1994;M. Isserman andM. Kazin,America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, Oxford, 2000; and A. Marwick, The Sixties: CulturalRevolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974, Oxford, 1998, feature science and

technology in a perfunctory way. An exception is H. Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought andCulture in the 1960s, New York, 1998.

BJHS 41(4): 567–600, December 2008. f 2008 British Society for the History of Sciencedoi:10.1017/S0007087408001179 First published online 15 July 2008

social movements, on which there is an immense literature. Wave Three features the

distinctive long-1960s strategy of analysis turned inward, of a self-critical self-consciousness. The three waves are viewed not as consecutive events but as phenomena

that interfere, sometimes building on each other, sometimes cancelling each other out.

They are not confined to one place, but nevertheless their meanings are locally under-stood. Indeed, one of the main implications of this paper is that we need locally sensi-

tive but internationally comparative studies of the sciences and technology in the long

1960s. At present national stories of transnational phenomena are often accounted forthrough nationally specific causes, which is inadequate.

The three-wave model organizes content from secondary literature in a way that

builds to make a positive and novel contribution to historians’ understanding of scienceand technology in the twentieth century in general and the long 1960s in particular. The

three waves interfere to produce what I label a sea change. One measure of the help-

fulness of a periodization is the extent to which it prompts further questions, researchprogrammes and lines of inquiry. I will indicate where these appear and might lead.

The intention throughout has been to make bold, positive statements where possible.

If they are quibbled with, transformed or knocked down by future study I will not beunhappy.

The ‘long 1960s’

No interesting periodization would have the 1960s beginning on New Year’s Day 1960and ending on 31 December 1969. However, there is no consensus on when a long

1960s might begin or end.3 Subjects shape historiography. Historians of popular musi-

cal culture might choose a long 1960s that stretched from the birth of rock ’n’ roll(1956, say) to Altamont (1969) or punk (1976).4 A media commentator has proposed a

long 1960s starting with the first artificial satellite (1957), with its implications for

communications and surveillance, and ending with the media-saturated televisualspectacle that was Watergate (1974).5 Social-movement historians have a surfeit of

dates, but one suggested long 1960s runs from Greensboro (1960) to the Congressional

approval of the Equal Rights Amendment (1972).6 Another might end with the UnitedStates’ departure from Vietnam (1975). Historians narrowly focused on the history of

the New Left might choose a long 1960s from the formation of the Students for a

Democratic Society (SDS – 1960) to the internal splits over violent action that endedSDS as a political force (1969). In The Sixties Arthur Marwick favours an economically

3 Note, too, that one can regard the long 1960s as containing critical moments of change without sub-scribing to a ‘ long 1960s’. A plausible case can be made, for example, for the shattering importance of the

years 1971–4: the end of the Bretton Woods monetary exchange system (with its implications for how in-

vestments were permitted to flow) and the oil crisis (with its consequent flood of new petro-money to be

invested).4 P. Friedlander, Rock and Roll: A Social History, Boulder, CO, 2006.

5 J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, New York, 2003,

11–12.

6 T. H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, Oxford, 1995, 13.

568 Jon Agar

oriented long 1960s from the growing recognition of the economic power of youth

(c.1958) to the oil shock (c.1974).7

Other historians have identified shorter periods of profound flux within the long

1960s. In such formulations, a ‘short 1960s’ might be sandwiched between the break-

down of the contained buttoned-down societies of the early Cold War and the recon-struction of a different order. Especially pertinent is Hollinger’s emphasis on the early

1960s. While rightly rejecting ‘The Sixties ’ as a ‘historiographic monster ’ that obscures

or even displaces true historical understanding, Hollinger insists that the early 1960switnessed a ‘number of important transformations, trajectories and tensions’ that de-

mand our attention.8 In particular, he gives a specific contextual argument for the rise of

a ‘radically reoriented learned discussion of the entire scientific enterprise’, not leastKuhn’s Structure (1962), to be assessed later in this paper.

While these commentators disagree about dates, they agree that a period of unusual

transformation was contained within the long 1960s. Set against them, in principle if notalways in practice, are commentators who favour a chronological framework that

stresses continuity rather than discontinuity. Foremost among these accounts are those

that emphasize the Cold War as a continuing and primary organizing process. Stillmore broadly, Hobsbawm proposes a ‘short twentieth century’ roughly coterminous

with the existence of the Soviet Union, in which the 1960s are demoted relative to the

outbreak and end of wars.9 Nevertheless, the ‘ long 1960s’ form a useful periodizationfor historians of science and technology. The label draws attention to some continuity

of aspirations and attitudes, actions and institutions, that together were seen to be part

of a process of change. A plausible account of the long 1960s would credit both con-tinuous and discontinuous features. In particular, the sciences and techniques promoted

under Cold War regimes were partly constitutive of long-1960s transformations.

‘Crisis ’ talk

To get a handle on what is at stake, drop in at Friends House, Euston Road, London in

November 1970. Over three days an average of seven hundred people per day gathered

at a meeting organized by the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science(BSSRS) to discuss the Social Impact of Modern Biology.10 It is an exemplary gathering

for understanding the history of science in the long 1960s. Its overflowing attendance

suggests that it asked a question resonant for its audience. Many, perhaps, had come tohear the ‘constellation of scientific superstars ’.11 But the conference was also unusual

7 Marwick, op. cit. (2), 7–8.

8 D. A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-twentieth Century AmericanIntellectual History, Princeton, 1996, 4–7.9 E. J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London, 1994.10 The politics, style, size and form of the BSSRS changed several times. Rosenhead has argued that until

1970 it can be thought of as a ‘classical operation with a distinguished and distinctive pedigree: the estab-lishment of a leftish pressure group to enlighten a liberal elite without alarming it excessively’. J. Rosenhead,

‘BSSRS – ten years’, Science for People (1979), 43/44, 23–5. The proceedings of the conference can be found

in W. Fuller (ed.), The Social Impact of Modern Biology, London, 1971.11 Rosenhead, op. cit. (10).

What happened in the sixties? 569

for its breadth: speakers included not only establishment ‘superstars ’ but young radi-

cals, historians of science and technicians, while the voices from the floor were stillmore diverse.12

The BSSRS was, crucially, both a revival and a neonate. Some of its advocates saw in

it a return to 1930s radicalism, while others saw novelty, a split that can only in-adequately be mapped on to ‘old left ’ and ‘New Left ’. In February 1969 a core group of

scientists, including Maurice Wilkins, cosmic ray physicist and Nobel prizewinner Cecil

Frank Powell, medical scientist R. L. Smith, physicist D. K. Butt and young ImperialCollege biochemist Steven Rose, were drumming up support for a new scientist–activist

movement. In a drive to find one hundred sympathetic ‘prominent scientists ’, they

wrote to Joseph Needham:

Over the last few months a group of scientists brought together by a common concern for thefuture of science and society have been discussing the need for an organisation which will beconcerned with the social responsibilities of the scientist. Many scientists have expressed theirconcern at the new evidence of the abuse and moral compromise of science that is now oc-curring. Thus the existence of classified scientific research in Universities, the current appli-cation of science to techniques of chemical and biological warfare, the potential abuse ofdiscoveries in molecular biology, have and are giving rise to grave disquiet amongst scientists.There has occurred a decline in morale among scientists and a loss of esteem for science in thecommunity at large. Furthermore, the future of science is threatened by the hostility now feltby young people towards science. These developments we believe originate from the mis-useand abuse of science.13

An inaugural meeting was held in April 1969, with addresses by an impressive roster

of professors.14 Over three hundred people attended, including the elderly and ill

J. D. Bernal. The audience, ‘healthily mixed, embracing ‘‘scientists, students and othersinterested in science ’’ ’, were challenged by Maurice Wilkins, in what was to become

the keynote theme: ‘We have to face the fact that there is a crisis in science today. ’15

While debate centred on some familiar concerns such as the status of engineers and thearts–science divide in secondary education, a sign of things to come came from the

intervention of a young statistician: ‘despite the plushy surroundings of this confer-

ence’, said Jonathan Rosenhead, ‘we have to face the fact that a lot of people are goingto be afraid that we are preaching subversion’. The BSSRS would indeed become a

broad church and it is precisely because its active membership stretched from elite

12 While some might feel that the meeting already conceded too much room, the radicals felt it nevertheless

‘ left little scope for those who were inexpert or poorly connected; indeed various steps were taken which had

the effect of discouraging grass-roots activity by the membership’. Rosenhead, op. cit. (10).

13 Wilkins et al. to Needham, 20 February 1969, Cambridge University Library, Needham Papers.Needham agreed to be a founder member. The archives of his papers are a major source of insight into the

changing nature of the BSSRS.

14 Speakers were Wilkins, Essex mathematician Professor G. A. Barnard, Sussex biologist Professor

J. Maynard Smith, R. L. Smith of St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, Powell, A. N. Oppenheim of the LSE,and HeinzWolff, who was at NIMR. Chairs included Professor E. H. S. Burlop, Steven Rose, Professor Henry

Miller (vice chancellor at Newcastle), and molecular biologist Professor Martin Pollock of Edinburgh.

15 ‘Inaugural meeting of BSSRS – April 19th Saturday’, undated. Cambridge University Library, Needham

Papers.

570 Jon Agar

scientists to ‘subversives ’, at least in the early years, that the society provides a good

case study of sea-change arguments.At the meeting on the Social Impact of Modern Biology in 1970, Wilkins reminded

the audience again of the ‘crisis in science today [which] has not only direct bearing on

the question of our survival but is of deep significance in relation to our fundamentalbeliefs and our value-judgments’ :

The main cause is probably the Bomb: scientists no longer have their almost arrogant confi-dence in the value of science. At the same time non-scientists increasingly and openly questionthe value of science. There are extremists who go further and object to rational thought as awhole.16

Wilkins portrayed the scientific community as deeply split over its response to this

growing ‘breakdown in confidence in reason’ among the many. Following the

use–abuse model, Wilkins concluded that it was vital not to ‘over-react’ lest this lead to‘overall condemnation of science ’, but to be socially responsible and choose to pursue

science that, to borrow Peter Medawar’s phrase, provided ‘imaginative uplift ’.

Seventeenth-century natural philosophy had possessed this quality. It was

still possible today to catch some of that imaginative uplift. Consider for example the branchof science that deals with nervous systems. Such science should not only lead to control ofnervous disorders but, by providing understanding of how the human brain works, shouldthrow new light on the nature of mind itself. The understanding should (to use hippie lan-guage) expand the mind … [Such] self-knowledge should greatly influence our values. Scienceis valuable, then, in terms of the self-knowledge that it gives.

Notice how this argument was structured. ‘Disturbances’, partly originating in ‘general

student unrest and political frustration’, but also originating ‘directly … with science,with its organization and social priorities ’, contributed to a sense of ‘crisis ’, and this

‘crisis in science is only part of a larger cultural crisis ’. This in turn led to scrutiny of the

sciences in a form of self-analysis, leading to the valorization of science’s potentialcontribution to self-knowledge. Wilkins ended by likening this ‘very critical phase in

the development of science ’ to another, ‘ the critical phase of the 17th century’. Wherethat phase provoked experimental solutions such as the Royal Society, the current

phase called for more ‘experiments that may produce unexpected results ’.

Other elite ‘ leftish’ scientists made similar arguments. Fresh from his widely pub-licized involvement in the 1968 Paris events, Jacques Monod proposed that science, as a

‘strictly objective approach to the analysis and interpretation of the universe … [which]

must ignore value judgements’, was destroying any and all ‘ traditional systemsof value’ :

Hence modern societies, living both economically and psychologically upon the technologicalfruits of science, have been robbed, by science itself, of any firm, coherent, acceptable ‘belief ’upon which to base their value systems. This, probably, is the greatest revolution that everoccurred in human culture. I mean, again, the utter destruction, by science, by the systematicpursuit of objective knowledge, of all belief systems, whether primitive or highly sophisticated,

16 M. Wilkins, ‘ Introduction’, in Fuller, op. cit. (10), 5–10.


which had, for thousands of years, served the essential function of justifying the moral codeand the social structure.17

This ‘revolution’, argued Monod, was ‘at the very root of the modern mal du siecle ’,especially among ‘the young’. When Monod looked out from the Institut Pasteur to seethe ‘revolution’ on the streets in 1968, one has to imagine him thinking the events were

caused by science.

The outsider physicist David Bohm presented a different argument, although onefully in tune with the preceding tone. Bohm’s involvement in radical student politics

while attending Berkeley in the 1930s had rebounded many times on his later life. He

had been barred from working at Los Alamos despite being Oppenheimer’s protege,was fired from Princeton after pleading the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-

American Activities Committee despite being Einstein’s co-worker, and had moved on

to Brazil and Israel before settling in England in 1957. Through the 1960s Bohm wasprofessor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College, London. His paper at Friends

House portrayed science as an arrogant priesthood: he drew direct parallels with

medieval scholasticism, presumably having read Frances Yates. But he portrayedproblems in science as manifestations of a ‘general social condition: fragmentation’.

Fragmentation had been a key theme, too, of Wilkins’s talk, and Wilkins was clearly

intellectually indebted to Bohm in the way he thought of crises in science. Bohm pre-scribed a new science of ‘holocyclation’ to unite a fractured world.

Wilkins was not the only contemporary commentator to identify ‘crises ’.18 Barry

Commoner, for example, had written in Science and Survival (1966) of the crises ofmodern biology, by which he meant a science that was being torn apart by the conflict

between traditional organismic science, derived from natural history, and an aggressive

new molecular biology. But Wilkins’s ‘crisis ’ is interesting because he portrayed it asa momentous condition afflicting the sciences more broadly. The point is not whether

Wilkins’s diagnosis was correct.19 Rather, it is that nearly all speakers at the con-

ference offered their own, often very individual, folk theory of what was wrong. Ifwe look outside the conference we find even more. A personal favourite is HeinzWolff’s

‘container’ theory of modern crises. It turns out it is not that we lack theories of

what happened in the long 1960s, but rather that we have a diversity of divergentaccounts.

I will later examine the two talks, by Jacob Bronowski and Robert M. Young, that

were judged at the time, albeit by different audiences, to have had the most electrifyingeffect. For now, note that the Social Impact of Modern Biology conference was large,

encompassed a broad spectrum of positions and attitudes among the speakers, andprovided a forum which aired sharply divergent accounts of what was amiss with

17 J. Monod, ‘On the logical relationship between knowledge and values’, in Fuller op. cit. (10), 11–12.

18 See D. Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America, New York, 1995, 243–71, for 1960s

crises more generally.19 The quantitative evidence, for example, is problematic. Amitai Etzioni and Clyde Z. Nunn reported the

results of the Louis Harris poll that the proportion of public expressing ‘great confidence’ in the people

‘running science’ had dropped from 56% (1966) to 37% (1972). A. Etzioni and C. Z. Nunn, ‘Public views of

scientists’, Science (1973), 181, 1123. This, of course, was not a measure of confidence in science.

572 Jon Agar

science. This divergence permitted Wilkins’s label of ‘crisis ’ to become a commonplace.

The meeting also witnessed divergent views on the very nature of scientific knowledge,ranging from an establishment use–abuse model on one side to a radical critique of

scientific knowledge shaped by ideology on the other.

The question is : how did we get to a world where a gathering like the Social Impactof Modern Biology was possible?

Sea change: three waves

Full fathom five thy father lies:Of his bones are coral made:Those are pearls that were his eyes :Nothing of him that doth fadeBut doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.

The Tempest, Act I Scene ii

Something about science changed in the long 1960s. The aim here is to characterizewhat changed and to analyse accounts of such change. In particular, I will describe

three waves of change that, together, amount to a sea change. Wave One can be called

the Balogh wave. In his unjustly neglected book, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate andPublic Participation in American Nuclear Power, 1945–1975 (1991), Brian Balogh

presented a model that accounted for how and why expert debate moved from a place

behind closed doors to become performance in public forums. Furthermore, the dy-namic Balogh described provides a clue as to why a diversity of experts was generated

and was visible in the period that interests us. Once divergent expert views could be

compared in public then a host of critical questions followed. Why did experts dis-agree? Did they share a ‘method’? If not, what could be said of a diversity of scientific

methods? Who was right? Who should say who was right? A historian can add to such

questions: was such disagreement new or was it the public scrutiny of disagreement thatwas new?

Balogh’s model, which draws substantially on the work of the eminence grise of

American environmental history, Samuel P. Hays, emphasized an internal organi-zational dynamic that first deepened reliance on experts, and placed them in private

opposition, then dragged the disagreements between experts into public view. But

Balogh does not have much to say about how expert knowledge was interpreted, re-interpreted, used and countered within broader society. Specifically, to the first wave we

must add a second. Social and cultural historians have appealed to social movements to

account for the energy, radicalism and tumultuous change of the long 1960s. Historiansof science need to draw on their work. We need to ask how science featured as subject,

object and tool of social movements – Wave Two. By doing so we will accomplish two

things. We will be able to understand what kind of public might be ready to turn theregard of public disagreements between experts into something approaching distrust in

authorities, among a diversity of reactions. This will be whereWave One interferes with

Wave Two. But we will also be making a contribution to the general history of the long


1960s, which discusses technology only in an abbreviated form and barely acknowl-

edges science at all. ‘Scientology’ and ‘science fiction’ may get index entries but ‘sci-ence’ does so much less often.

Some of the best recent general histories of the long 1960s have stressed that along-

side familiar currents associated with the political left there flourished not only anintellectual resurgence on the right, but also, crucially, an entrepreneurialism or indi-

vidualism that was prominent throughout.20 Historians of science have demonstrated

that science in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the life sciences, responded in newways to market demands and the forces of commercialization.21 The question of

Wave Three is simply this : what connections can be drawn between the distinctive

individualism and entrepreneurialism of the long 1960s and particular trends in thesciences, including commercialization, sociobiological evolutionary arguments and

certain representations of the scientist in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s? Some general

history has begun to ask parallel questions.22 But my argument goes further than merelyan exercise in identifying and accounting for influences across decades. Wave Three

is the hardest to describe but also the most profound. Yet Wave Three can be identified

by common features of self-awareness, self-scrutiny, even self-analysis. This was aself-consciousness that, even when inquiry was directed at other subjects, tended

towards self-description. Here I will call modern science studies as witness to its

own birth.

Wave One: the Balogh model

Balogh’s Chain Reaction described an institutional dynamic. It is superficially a case

study of experts and expertise in and around the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),the civilian body set up in 1946 to manage the Manhattan Project inheritance of lab-

oratories, nuclear factories and nuclear policies in the US. In its early years, notes

Balogh, experts within the AEC designed policy agendas with little reference to publicdemand. Experts might and did disagree, but debate was contained within AEC com-

mittees and boards and was invisible to an outside world. However, faced with flagging

demand for the AEC’s product – electricity from nuclear power stations – the expertsand bureaucrats of the AEC were forced to appeal outwith the AEC in order to build

20 G. Andrews, R. Cockett, A. Hooper andM.Williams (eds.),New Left, New Right and Beyond: Takingthe Sixties Seriously, Basingstoke, 1999, on the New Right; Marwick, op. cit. (2), for entrepreneurialism

across movements in the long 1960s; Brick, op. cit. (2), 117, for entrepreneurialism, and 188–9, for the New

Right.

21 S. Krimsky, Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy, Cambridge,MA, 1982; S. Wright, ‘Recombinant DNA technology and its social transformation, 1972–1982’, Osiris(1986), 2, 303–60; M. Kenney, Biotechnology: The University–Industrial Complex, New Haven, 1986;

D. Dickson, The New Politics of Science, Chicago, 1988, 243–60; S. Wright, Molecular Politics: DevelopingAmerican and British Regulatory Policy for Genetic Engineering, 1972–1982, Chicago, 1994; A. Thackray(ed.), Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences, Philadelphia, 1998; S. Smith

Hughes, ‘Making dollars out of DNA’, Isis (2001), 92, 541–75.22 P. Jenkins,Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, Oxford,

2006.

574 Jon Agar

demand. Two processes were now combined. First, experts as specialists were oriented

towards divergent, even contradictory, missions. This divergence in institutional inter-ests lay at the root of the internal disagreements that had taken place behind closed

doors. Different positions were now being articulated outside the closed world of the

meeting rooms of the past. Second, external bodies were forced to employ more expertsin order to make sense of, and judgements on, the expert claims emanating from the

AEC. These experts, too, were specialists aligned to their particular bodies’ projects and

thus made different cases in public, which in turn required further expert interpretation.This institutional dynamic therefore created a demand for increasing numbers of ex-

perts (a ‘chain reaction’), and, as an unintended by-product, the conditions for the

spectacle of expert disagreement in public.Balogh’s case study centred on one body (the AEC) in one country (the United States).

But I wish to draw attention to the model, not to its specific application. While the

‘chain reaction’ seems expressly invented to describe the dynamics of nuclear expertise,Balogh’s model is generalizable. Hays has described a very similar dynamic in en-

vironmental policy-making over the same period.23 When the dynamic is placed

alongside good cultural histories of environmental science, such as Russell’s War andNature, a remarkably similar account can be built. So, for example, there existed expert

knowledge about the deleterious effects of DDT from 1946, but assessments and argu-

ments were internal and not readily visible from outside.24 Only later, by the long1960s, as we shall see, were there sufficient accessible divergent expert views about the

effects of pesticides that they could be orchestrated to become a publicly visible conflict.

It is also quite likely that a Wave One-style analysis would explain why large databaseswere not publicly regarded as a threat to personal privacy in the 1940s but suddenly

were so regarded in the early 1960s.25

Balogh’s model gives the demand-side picture that helps us understand one of thesupply-side features of the post-war decades : the rapid expansion and growth of higher-

education institutions. This growth entirely complemented the Cold War demand for

technical expertise relevant to building missiles, radar, nuclear warheads, eavesdrop-ping networks and jet aircraft. Across the Western world, new universities were es-

tablished and old ones reformed and expanded to produce expert administrators ofwhat Balogh labels the ‘proministrative’ state. The proministrators were produced to

meet the demand for experts produced by Wave One, the Balogh institutional dynamic.

The dynamic is well described as a ‘chain reaction’, making splits in expertise publiclyvisible and multiplying their number at each turn.

Though largely absent from Balogh’s own account, journalists and the changing

nature of journalism were critical to Wave One. First, at a simple level, the media werecarriers of expert views. Despite fears that the public was losing interest in science

stories, quantitative evidence suggests that readership of science and invention stories

23 See, for example, S. P. Hays, Explorations in Environmental History, Pittsburgh, 1998, 185–97.24 E. Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent

Spring, Cambridge, 2001, 158–63.

25 J. Agar, The Government Machine, Cambridge, MA, 2003.


increased during the later long 1960s.26 Second, journalists could ventriloquize, even

replace, expert voices. In this way, journalists would not merely represent experts butanticipate and reconstruct what an expert might say. Finally, journalists became sour-

ces of criticism of science and also critics of other journalists insufficiently critical of

science. This kind of complaint became articulable: Science journalists ‘are a bunch ofpatsies prone to uncritical acceptance of anything we are told by our authorities – our

authorities being doctors and scientists ’.27 In particular, the notion developed that sci-

ence reporters should report on science just as political reporters report on politics.Daniel S. Greenberg writing in Science is perhaps the paradigmatic example. This was

an aspect, argues Nelkin, of the rise of the advocacy press, since to reject the received

form of objectivity in journalism, granting equal time to each side, was to be drawn intofurther questioning of objectivity.28 The relevance to Wave One is that an advocacy

press based its authority on its own sources of expertise. Even some traditional science

journalists ‘adapted their writing to the spirit of the times’, becoming critical in thelong 1960s.29

But why should such different Wave One dynamics all coincide in time? There are

two kinds of answer. First, the institutional dynamics producing experts were not in-dependent. The demand for nuclear expertise, for example, created in its wake a de-

mand for ecological expertise.30 The demand for large computerized databases for

cryptanalysis and early-warning systems produced the technologies, such as symbolsearching, that were identified as threats to personal privacy. Second, the unparalleled

military improvisation of technical projects in the Second World War, further re-

inforced by the immediate start of the Cold War, provided a common starting point forthese institutional dynamics. In short, in the years around 1945 experts were likely to be

hidden in internal committees, while by the long 1960s they were more numerous and

more likely to be drawn into conflicting positions. The moment of the long 1960s tookthe form it did because an institutional dynamic softened a rigid enclosure of expertise

that contingently and extraordinarily was set in place in the mid-twentieth century.

We can see, however, what is explanatorily missing from Wave One and what isneeded from Wave Two. Balogh’s model does not indicate where and why the agents

emerged who could turn observable discord into observed discord. It certainly does notdescribe the interests, demands, cultures, motives or lives of these observers. Nor does

Wave One explain who the orchestrators of expert disagreement might be.31 Wave Two

26 C. Z. Nunn, ‘ Is there a crisis of confidence in science?’, Science (1977), 198, 995.27 Henry Pierce of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 1966, quoted in D. Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press

Covers Science and Technology, New York, 1995 (revised edition; first published 1987), 89.

28 Nelkin, op. cit. (27), 89–93.

29 Nelkin, op. cit. (27), 93. Nelkin offers as an example David Perlman, whose career stretched from the1950s to the 1980s, but whose tone became critical around 1972.

30 See discussion of the Odums in J. B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology,New Brunswick, 1992.

31 Indeed, institutionalist Wave One literature can actively reject the importance of such orchestrators.Examine the scarcity of references to Rachel Carson, for example, in S. P. Hays, A History of EnvironmentalPolitics since 1945, Pittsburgh, 2000. Or again: ‘The entire subject of environmental affairs is attributed to the

writings and ideas of some widely read author such as Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich, when, in fact, the source

of those affairs is found far more in the immediate human circumstances that people experience. ’ S. P. Hays,

576 Jon Agar

will tell us that the observers were members of new social movements and the orches-

trators key figures in such movements.

Wave Two: social movements

Social movements were highly visible features of long-1960s politics and culture.

Studies of Wave Two, the wave carried by social movements, make up the vast bulk ofliterature on the period. The relevant question here is : what roles must social move-

ments play in an account of changing science in the long 1960s?

‘Social movements ’ were the constructs of social science as much as social move-ments were its objects of study. In a process reminiscent of Balogh’s model, social

scientific expertise about social movements proliferated from the 1950s to the 1960s.

Studies ranged from collective-behaviour theory, drawing on traditional work on theirrationality of crowds, through Marxist accounts, to New Social Movement ap-

proaches, which significantly emphasized the importance of self-identification,

Goffman-inspired frame accounts and a variety of other theoretical stances.32 Amongthese approaches were those that picked out an oppositional core to social movements,

a ‘counter-culture’.33 Nevertheless, for example, the proportion of American students

who identified with a ‘counter-culture’ was tiny compared to those who were sustainedand changed by social movements more generally.34

This secondary literature and first-hand accounts allow a number of features of

social movements to be made out. First, social movements had a distinctive fluid, net-work form. While there were prominent spokespeople, heroes and revered ancestors,

each social movement was a patchwork of sometimes short-lived organizations and

campaigns. What gave a social movement cohesion was a rough consensus on ultimatetargets, such as nuclear disarmament or the removal of racism. Such targets were

boundary objects that enabled coordination within the network-like movement. The

presence of targets strongly promoted a polarized culture that structured much of theliterature, speeches, actions and identities of the movements. Social movements thus

shared an oppositional tone. This matches a cliche : if there were common targets

across the social movements of the long 1960s, then they would include oppositionto ‘authority’, the ‘hierarchy’, the ‘establishment’, ‘ technocracy’,35 the ‘system’,

‘ the man’.

‘Introduction: an environmental historian amid the thickets of environmental politics’, in idem, op. cit. (23),

8–11, 14–25.

32 D. della Porta and M. Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, Oxford, 1999; M. Giugni,D.McAdam and C. Tilly (eds.),How Social MovementsMatter, Minneapolis, 1999; A. E. Hunt,The Turning:A History of Vietnam Veterans against the War, New York, 1999.

33 P. Braunstein and M. W. Doyle, ‘Historicizing the American counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s’, in

Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s (ed. P. Braunstein and M. W. Doyle),London, 2002, 5–14; T. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Berkeley, 1995 (first published 1968).

34 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 40. Anderson, op. cit. (6), 17. Furthermore, only 13% of US college students in

1969 identified themselves as ‘new left ’ (and only 3% outside of college).

35 Roszak, op. cit. (33).


Second, social movements learnt from each other, exchanging and transmitting

members, ideas and techniques.36 The relevant social movements here include, butare not restricted to, civil rights, anti-nuclear movements, anti-Vietnam movements,

political activism typified by umbrella groups such as SDS, new environmentalism

and feminism. Each movement, but in particular the civil rights movement of the1950s, became a model for later movements, just as they in turn drew inspiration,

techniques and other lessons from even earlier tides of activism, including the anti-

slavery campaigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, there was a‘Movement’, a term with considerable resonance. It is an actors’ category, while as an

analyst’s category it emphasizes the social foundations of historical change. Some

authors map the long 1960s precisely onto the rise and fall of these social movementsthat made up the Movement. Others insist on a less rigidly institutional analysis.

Anderson, for example, insists that ‘movement’ is a useful term when it ‘connotes all

activists who demonstrated for social change. Anyone could participate: There were nomembership cards. Sara Evans, a civil rights volunteer, later wrote, ‘‘Above all the term

‘movement’ was self-descriptive. There was no way to join; you simply announced or

felt yourself to be part of the movement ’’’.37

Equipped with a sense of these terms we can now see how science figures in Wave

Two. Science and scientists featured in social movements in three relationships. First,

certain scientists and sciences were objects of criticism because they were seen withinsocial movements as tools of their opponents. Second, places where science was done

became theatres for social-movement demonstration. Third, scientists-as-activists were

contributors to social movements. This third relationship took two forms: their sciencecould be incidental to their involvement in a movement, or, most significantly, it could

be the cause, the tool, the object and subject of activism. The cases considered below

involve all three of these relationships.The civil rights and anti-nuclear movements furnish candidates for science-as-an-

object-of-criticism. Henry E. Garrett, professor and head of the psychology department

at Columbia University, testified in support of segregation in the Davis vs CountySchool Board case of 1952.38 He argued against anthropological studies of the Franz

Boas school, and against the position held by Ashley Montagu, who had led theUNESCO 1950 statement on race which questioned typological conceptions of race and

innate racial differences in intelligence. Psychological evidence was also integral to the

case that overturned the conclusions of Davis vs County School Board – Brown vsBoard of Education (1954).39 In such cases science-as-the-tool-of-the-opponent (Garrett

and others) was countered by expert testimony (such as Montagu’s) mobilized by

bodies within the civil rights movement such as the National Association for the

36 Mendelsohn, op. cit. (1), 159.

37 Anderson, op. cit. (6), p. x.

38 A. S. Winston, ‘Science in the service of the Far Right: Henry E. Garrett, the IAAEE, and the LibertyLobby’, Journal of Social Issues (1998), 54, 179–210. W. H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of RacialResearch, Urbana, 1994.39 J. P. Jackson, Jr, ‘Creating a consensus: psychologists, the Supreme Court, and school desegregation,

1952–1955’, Journal of Social Issues (1998), 54, 143–77.

578 Jon Agar

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The environmental–hereditarian contro-

versy continued after civil rights legislation was enacted. Arthur Jensen and WilliamShockley appealed directly to reactionary public individuals and groups in the 1960s

and the 1970s, an appeal rebutted, also in public, by critics. The end effect, as in Wave

One, was ‘socially visible’ disagreement.40

At first glance, nuclear science is also a candidate for science-as-an-object-of-

criticism. Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), for example, chose the

UK’s nuclear weapons laboratory, Aldermaston, as terminus of its Easter marches. Butsuch an analysis is too simplistic. CND’s focus, as a lived experience, was as much on

the self as on the products of Cold War science.41 As we shall see, this is an early

intimation of Wave Three. CND was a form of revivalism: religious figures, organi-zations and language, not least J. B. Priestley’s ‘moral crusade’, framed the protests.

These were protests against the immorality of defending affluent society with nuclear

weapons.42 Nevertheless, CND also illustrates social movements’ capacity to providetemporary institutions in which to learn what was possible. In the words of one com-

mentator, it was a ‘visible social alternative’, even an ‘imminent counter-culture that

merged personal expressiveness with political activism’, an exemplary ‘march of thedissenting young’.43

From the days of the Manhattan Project, scientists offered the ‘most serious resist-

ance to the use of the Bomb’, but their critique was of use (and abuse) rather than of thescience.44 Nevertheless, there were seeds of a critique of use–abuse instrumentalism.

While science was seen by some as a neutral tool that was being abused rather than well

used, for CND nuclear science was a tool it would rather did not exist in the world.A case could thence be made that, from Leo Szilard onwards, nuclear control or

disarmament campaigns were one source of a major intellectual strand of the sea

change because they prompted questions about the neutrality of science. Scientists’arguments could be appropriated and reinterpreted as more generalized critiques.45

But the moral-crusade rhetoric of CND and aligned bodies supplanted rather than

complemented scientist-led critiques of nuclear weapon policy. Before 1958, many

40 Y. Ezrahi, ‘The authority of science in politics’, in Science and Values: Patterns of Tradition andChange (ed. A. Thackray and E. Mendelsohn), New York, 1974, 215–51, 232: ‘ the principal audience of the

debate was not so much the scientific community itself but the lay public, the contestants were naturally led toinvest much effort in building indirect evidence through which science is made more socially visible in order to

persuade the public that their opinion is more representative of the true scientific consensus than that of their

rivals’.41 F. Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, Manchester, 1968; J. Mattausch, A Commitment to Campaign:

A Sociological Study of CND, Manchester, 1989.

42 V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky, Age of Affluence, 1951–1964, London, 1970.43 Nigel Young, quoted in J. Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and Counterculture, London, 1999, 24–5.44 L. S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, Volume 1, One World or None: A History of the World

Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953, Stanford, 1993, 29.45 A possible example is the accusation made by the Greater St Louis Committee for Nuclear Information

that Edward Teller had ‘a vested interest in arguing that atomic fallout was not harmful. In response, Tellerattacked CNI member Edward U. Condon’s claim that fallout was dangerous, claiming that it was politically

motivated and suspect scientifically because Condon had been investigated by the House Un-American

Activities Committee’. K. Moore, ‘Organizing integrity: American science and the creation of public interest

organizations, 1955–1975’, American Journal of Sociology (1996), 101, 1592–627, 1614.


prominent interventions had been led by scientists. Examples include the Chicago sci-

entists’ opposition to the use of the Bomb before Hiroshima, the foundation of theBulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Russell–Einstein manifesto of 1955, the first Pugwash

conference of 1957 and the petition organized by Linus Pauling in 1957–8, signed by

11,038 scientists from forty-nine countries, including thirty-seven Nobel laureates.46

Scientists were not so prominent after 1958.47

Social movements learnt from each other. In many ways, environmental activists

appropriated the roles and arguments of activist nuclear scientists. For example, RachelCarson repeatedly drew parallels between radiation and pesticides in arguments in

Silent Spring (1962). She could be confident that her reference to Lucky Dragon, theJapanese fishing vessel contaminated by fallout, would be familiar to her audience. Anaudience that had sat, terrified, through the Cuban missile crisis, could translate from

the effects of one known insidious invisible contaminant to make another unknown

meaningful and alarming.Carson is an exemplary Wave Two orchestrator, and Silent Spring an exemplary

Wave Two text. In the early 1950s at the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), Carson had

been able to sit at the centre of three networks. First, the reports of different expertssuch as oceanographers, marine biologists, ornithologists and ecologists crossed her

desk, an obligatory passage point in the FWS’s review process. Second, through her

contacts with bodies such as the Audubon and Wilderness societies, Carson was intouch with naturalists and nature writers. Finally, through her skilful agent she could

tap the resources of the publishing world. This position, combined with an enviable gift

of expression, provided the basis for the publishing successes of The Sea Around Us(1951) and Silent Spring. More importantly, Carson was ideally placed to orchestrate

the public display of expert difference.48 This staging and demonstration of expert dis-

agreement is at the heart of Silent Spring. Wave One had produced the experts anddivergent expert views. Wave Two presented and observed these divergent views in

public and linked them to the causes of social movements. Carson issued a call to arms.

The public that ‘endures ’ pesticide effects had the right to know and an obligation toact. The members of social movements, in this case the new environmentalism, pro-

vided the core readership and audience for Carson’s public orchestration. New readers,in turn, became potential new members, a growing audience that could be upset, con-

cerned and eventually curious about rival expert claims. Social movements were re-

sourceful institutions that could sustain scrutiny of expertise. Barry Commoner

46 L. S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, Volume 2, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the WorldNuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970, Stanford, 1997, 39.47 For the criticism of scientist–activists by strategic analysts, such as Albert Wohlstetter and Herman

Kahn in the context of 1960s debates, see S. Hong, ‘Man and machine in the 1960s’, Techne (2004), 7, 49–77.48 For example, Jamison and Eyerman note, ‘What made it valuable and useful for the movement that

eventually took form around its message was its discussion of the alternative ecological solution, ‘‘ the other

road’’ [i.e. biological controls] … As she outlined those alternatives, she once again, as in all her writings, letthe scientists themselves speak, bringing not only people but dispute, contradiction, difference of opinion into

the world of the expert. Perhaps even more important than the particular conflict she wrote about – between

chemical and biological insect control – was the presentation of conflict itself ’. A. Jamison and R. Eyerman,

Seeds of the Sixties, Berkeley, 1994, 99–100. My emphasis.

580 Jon Agar

addressed this moment explicitly : ‘ If two protagonists claim to know as scientists,

through the merits of the methods of science, the one that nuclear testing is essential tothe national interest, the other that it is destructive of the national interest, where lies

the truth?’ The fact that the ‘thoughtful citizen’ has to ask ‘How do I know which

scientist is telling the truth?’ ‘ tells us that the public is no longer certain that sci-entists – all of them – ‘‘ tell the truth’’. ’49

This is the model through which the sea change could orchestrate the appearance of

crisis. The situation in which a concerned witness is confronted by a spectacle of expertdisagreement was replicated many times as Wave One interfered with Wave Two. If

asked to choose, the witness was faced with a difficult choice between two experts, each

claiming to ‘know as scientists ’. The slippage identified by Commoner, the slide fromchallenges to some scientists to doubt in Science (‘all of them’) was invited by this

situation. It is a situation that called yet again for the production of more experts. As we

see below, science studies has a self-interest in this moment.A second slippage was a common feature of social movements. Competition for

activists’ attention, time and resources, in combination with the loose organizational

structure of movements, encouraged movement between movements. For example,there is some evidence that campaigns against war in Vietnam weakened disarmament

activism.50 Alternatively, social movements could run together if the targets, good

boundary objects, proved flexible enough to coordinate action among very differentgroups. Feenberg’s account of the May 1968 events can be translated into these terms.

Surveying more broadly the ‘dramatic shift in attitudes toward technology that oc-

curred in the 1960s’, it was ‘not so much technology’, he notes, ‘as rising technocracythat provoked public hostility’.51 In Paris, in particular, when the university was read as

a technocratic society in miniature, the students could make common cause with

workers’ movements and with French middle strata. In May 1968 student demon-strations closed universities, ten million strikers joined them and opposition to the

establishment ‘exploded among teachers, journalists, employees in the ‘‘culture

industry’’, social service workers and civil servants, and even among some middle lowerlevel business executives ’.52 Here positive notions of ‘autonomy’ acted as a common

coordinating thread. Calls for autonomy were not calls for severance from society butidentification with the ‘people’ against technocratic masters. ‘While the May Events

did not succeed in overthrowing the state’, summarizes Feenberg, the ferment starting

on the French campuses ‘accomplished something else of importance, an anti-techno-cratic redefinition of the idea of progress that continues to love in a variety of forms to

this day’.53 When revolutionary ideals were scaled back to ‘modest realizable goals ’,

a successful new micropolitics of technology emerged.54

49 B. Commoner, Science and Survival, London, 1971 (first published 1966), 127. My emphasis.

50 For example, Wittner, op. cit. (46), 455.

51 A. Feenberg, Questioning Technology, London, 1999, 4.52 Feenberg, op. cit. (51), 31.53 Feenberg, op. cit. (51), 43.

54 Feenberg’s examples are client-centred professionalism, ‘changed medical practices in fields such as

childbirth and experimentation on human subjects’, participatory management and design, ‘communication

applications of computers’, and ‘environmentally conscious technological advance’.


Like the Paris streets, American campuses became theatres for anti-technocracy

protest. At Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement, which began in 1964 and grew fromcivil rights campaigns, launched a tide of student activism. By the following year

Berkeley campus was a centre of anti-Vietnam protest and organization. The Vietnam

War, notes Feenberg, ‘was conceived by the US government and sold to the public as atechnical problem American ingenuity could quickly solve’.55 Edgar Friedenberg’s re-

sponse to the call by the president of UC Berkeley for universities to be ‘multiversities ’,

putting knowledge at the disposal of society’s powers (not least the military), was to callinstead for the university to be ‘society’s specialized organ of self-scrutiny’.56 At

Princeton military-sponsored research was fiercely debated from 1967, pitting activist

engineers such as Steve Slaby against Cold Warrior scientist Eugene Wigner, who li-kened the actions of the SDS to those of Nazi students.57 Protest fizzled after one final

summer of strikes in 1970 and a committee (chaired by Thomas Kuhn) reported that

Princeton had relatively little military-sponsored research.58 At Stanford student andfaculty protests against secret contracts and classified research began in 1966. ‘The

extent of Stanford’s classified research program’, centred at the Applied Electronics

Laboratory and the Stanford Research Institute (home to counter-insurgency projects),writes Leslie, ‘although common knowledge among the engineers, shocked an aca-

demic community still coming to terms with the Vietnam War’.59 In 1967 a Stanford

‘student-run alternative college ’, the Experiment, called for the indictment of universityofficials and trustees for ‘war crimes’, while the Experiment and the local SDS chapter

organized antiwar marches and campaigns.60 April 1969 saw the occupation of the

Applied Engineering Laboratory by protesters.SDS had also organized a small sit-in against Dow Chemical at MIT in November

1967, but it was federal defence contracts at the university that triggered vehement

opposition.61 MIT received more defence research and development grants than anyother university. Its Lincoln and Instrumentation laboratories, specializing in electron-

ics and missile guidance technologies respectively, as well as the independent but

adjacent MITRE labs, were very much part of the Cold War ‘first line of defence’.Nevertheless, at MIT, the conversion in 1967 of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory,

from missiles, jet engines and re-entry physics to environmental and medical research,

55 Feenberg, op. cit. (51), 4.

56 Edgar Friedenberg, ‘LA of the intellect ’, New York Review of Books, 14 November 1963, 11–12,discussed in Brick, op. cit. (2), 24–5.

57 M. Wisnioski, ‘Inside ‘‘ the system’’ : engineers, scientists, and the boundaries of social protest in the

long 1960s’, History and Technology (2003), 19, 313–33.

58 Wisnioski, op. cit. (57), 320.59 S. W. Leslie, The Military–Industrial–Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, New York, 1993, 242.

The implication is that the technicians and scientists working directly on the defence projects were on the

whole unsympathetic to the protesters. Likewise at MIT one graduate student told a reporter, ‘What I’m

designing may one day be used to kill people. I don’t care. I’m given an interesting technological problem and Iget enjoyment out of solving it. ’ ‘Most [laboratory workers] blamed the trouble on outside agitators with no

sense of the laboratory’s real mission or accomplishments. ’ Leslie, op. cit., 238.

60 Leslie, op. cit. (59), 242–4.

61 Leslie, op. cit. (59), 235. Dow Chemical had sought graduate recruits.

582 Jon Agar

provided an exemplar for the protesters.62 In January 1969 MIT faculty members called

a strike intended to ‘provoke ‘‘a public discussion of problems and dangers related tothe present role of science and technology in the life of our nation’’ ’.63 The protesters’

manifesto of 4 March called for ‘turning research applications away from the present

emphasis on military technology toward the solution of pressing environmental andsocial problems’.64 A tense standoff between protesters and Instrumentation

Laboratory boss Charles Stark Draper was broken by a riot, featuring police dogs and

tear gas, in November 1969. In both the MIT and Stanford cases the moderate pro-testers won. The Instrumentation Laboratory was divested from MIT to become the

independent Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in 1970, while the Stanford Research

Institute was also divested and its campus annex, the theatre of protest, closed. Theradicals had wanted conversion. All the divested Cold War laboratories prospered un-

der continued defence patronage and with continuing ties with the adjacent, if now

formally independent, universities.65

The campuses and laboratory plazas were indeed theatres of demonstration.

Furthermore, the establishment of new bodies indicates that much else was at stake.

MIT students and faculty initiated the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in 1969. Ina link back from Vietnam to disarmament, what started as a concern about campus

contributions to the war in South East Asia shifted in the 1970s to a critique of nuclear

safety issues.66 The UCS was particularly active in the second Cold War period of the1980s, organizing a report that in many ways was an echo of Pauling’s 1957–8 peti-

tion.67 The UCS, alongside the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (SIPI, formed

in 1963) and Science for the People (SftP, founded in 1969 ‘as a group dedicated tofinding ways to take political and social action against the war in Vietnam’) have all

been studied by the sociologist Kelly Moore, who has offered an interesting general

argument.68 Moore argues that ‘public interest science organizations’, such as UCS,SIPI and SftP, were an institutional response to a severe quandary posed by the mixture

of political activism and the sciences :

Activist scientists had to be politically critical of science without suggesting that the content ofscientific knowledge might be tainted by non-scientific values …More specifically, they facedtwo related problems. First, their activities and claims threatened to fragment professionalorganizations that represented ‘pure’ science and unity among scientists. Second, once thediscussion became public, it threatened to reveal the subjective nature of problem choices,methods, and interpretations because it focused attention on the relationship between spon-sors of science and scientific knowledge.69

62 See Wisnioski, op. cit. (57), 323, for discussion of this conversion as pragmatic rather than ideological.

63 B. Magasanik, J. Ross and V. Weisskopf, ‘No research strike at MIT’, Science (1969), 163, 517, quotedin Leslie, op. cit. (59), 233.64 Leslie, op. cit. (59), 233. See also J. Allen (ed.), March 4: Students, Scientists, and Society, Cambridge,

MA, 1970.

65 Leslie, op. cit. (59), 250.

66 L. S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, Volume 3, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of theWorld Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present, Stanford, 2003, 11.67 Wittner, op. cit. (46), 172–3.

68 Moore, op. cit. (45), 1592–627.

69 Moore, op. cit. (45), 1594.


Such tensions were reconciled, argues Moore, through the formation of public-interest

science organizations. They ‘made serving the public interest relatively permanent anddurable, obfuscated how political interests affect scientific knowledge, and helped

preserve the organizational representations of scientific unity : professional science or-

ganizations’. In other words, The UCS, SIPI and SftP functioned to preserve the purityof bodies such as MIT, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and

the American Physical Society, respectively.70 Also clearly revealed in Moore’s study is

the extent to which this institutional response was provoked by the problem that ‘at-tention was increasingly being drawn to multiple interpretations of scientific evi-dence – certainly not a desirable state of affairs for a profession that relies more so than

others on the presentation of unanimity on rules, methods, and interpretations ’.71

While she does not cite Balogh or Hays, Moore’s account is clearly compatible with the

Balogh model sketched in Wave One. Science for the People is the body that fits

Moore’s analysis least well. Established as Scientists for Social and Political Action in1969 (later adding ‘and Engineers’ to become SESPA), Science for the People produced

a bimonthly magazine (reaching a circulation of two thousand), squabbled internally

and organized protests between 1969 and 1972, not least at AAAS meetings.72 After1972 Science for the People quietened. By the late 1970s it had ‘evolved into a moder-

ate, more biology-directed group, focussing on issues such as Sociobiology’.73 It closed

in 1991. Nevertheless, before then it was a direct and tangible influence on the BSSRS.Once these public-interest science organizations had been formed, to preserve the purity

of core scientific organizations the protagonists were constrained to deploy use/misuse

rhetoric and avoid discussions of the shaping of scientific content by interests.74

Wave Three

Wave One was an institutional dynamic that dragged experts into public display.

Disagreement between experts, previously private, was now potentially publicly visible.Wave Two concerned the growth and actions of new social movements. The social

movements provided the reason, people and resources. They cultivated the skills

necessary to turn disagreement between experts into opposition to experts identified

70 The best single piece of evidence is the following response to the call for the APS to take a stand on the

Vietnam War: ‘It would be unwise and uncalled for to jeopardize the purely scientific nature of the APS andthe harmony between its members by introducing politics in any form and of any denomination. Let those

who must begin their own society.’ Goetz Oertel, letter to editor of Physics Today, February 1968, quoted in

Moore, op. cit. (45), 1610.

71 Moore, op. cit. (45), 1608. Her emphasis (and an emphasis that works here too). The quotation isdiscussing Barry Commoner’s experience in setting up the Greater St Louis Committee for Nuclear

Information (CNI), precursor to SIPI, and is clearly in line with the account of Commoner above.

72 Wisnioski, op. cit. (57), 325–6.

73 Wisnioski, op. cit. (57), 327.74 Moore explicitly argues that focusing on ‘misuse’ of science was a ploy to avoid the ‘serious problems’

raised by ‘multiple interpretations of evidence [that] were possible among scientists, undermining the claims

of scientists to universal standards of interpretation’ that arose in publicly observed controversy. Moore, op.

cit. (45), 1613.

584 Jon Agar

with the targets of social movements, and, more profoundly, into questions about the

nature of expertise. Wave Three is given cohesion by common features all concerningthe ‘self ’ in the long 1960s. It is a commonplace that the post-war baby-boom gener-

ation held attitudes in opposition to those of their parents’ generation. More significant

is the observation that the baby-boom generation identified and analysed themselves asdifferent.75

Self-consciousness emerged as a theme in elite intellectual thought partly as a reac-

tion against overbearing systematization. The dominant social science was quantitativeand scientistic in method and, in the words of Hollinger, ‘ triumphalist ’ in spirit,

‘marked by the buzzwords modernization theory and the end of ideology’.76 But the

books of Daniel Bell and Walt Rostow, while governing policy, were not the textsdeemed influential among the members of social movements in the long 1960s. The

texts and authors that were influential had a common theme of overbearing structural

determination and the limits on responses of the individual. The works of Marcuse canbe glossed as such.77 Another text, to be discussed in more detail because it relates to the

sociology of science and technology, is Jacques Ellul’s Technological Society. An aca-

demic theologian from Bordeaux, Ellul would not have reached such a wide anglo-phone audience were it not for a fortunate intervention by Aldous Huxley. The author

of Brave New World recommended an obscure French text, Ellul’s La Technique(1954), to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions of the Fund for theRepublic, Inc., Santa Barbara, and its translation and dissemination became the

favoured project of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. With a foreword by the foremost

sociologist of science in the United States, Robert K. Merton, The TechnologicalSociety was published in 1964.

Ellul’s argument concerned the expansion of ‘technique’, an omnivorous entity de-

fined as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (fora given stage of development) in every field of human activity ’.78 Technique did not

merely mean machines, a crucial point for Ellul. Indeed, machines were merely one

human creation that had been absorbed by technique. Technique had agency beyondhuman control. It was autonomous; it ‘ integrates everything’. While technique was as

old as human societies, it had particularly fastened its grip as the methods of the‘technical revolution’ of the late eighteenth century – economic, mechanical, military,

administrative and police innovations – had been assimilated.79 Ellul’s was therefore an

75 Ravetz, too, emphasizes demographic forces – an affluent, marketeered, free youth – underpinning cri-

tique. Ravetz, op. cit. (1).

76 D. A. Hollinger, ‘Science as a weapon in Kulturkampfe in the United States during and after WorldWarII ’, Isis (1995), 86, 440–54, 450; emphasis removed.

77 Marcuse’s analysis is framed within his concept of an ‘advanced industrial society’. Technology was

part of this, and science, in turn, part of technology. Marcuse’s framework therefore invited critiques of

science, particularly from his New Left readership, as part of a critique of advanced industrial society.‘Revolutionary consciousness-raising’ was a strategy proposed in H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man:Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston, 1964.78 J. Ellul, The Technological Society, tr. John Wilkinson, New York, 1964, 25.

79 Ellul, op. cit. (78), 43.


extreme version of an industrial-modernism thesis. ‘Modern technique’ was rational

and artificial : these were two characteristics Ellul admitted other authors had noticed.But it was also ‘self-directing’ and self-augmenting, and formed a whole in which any

differentiations were secondary. The twentieth century had witnessed the further

spread of technique into all human affairs, a quantitative but not qualitative develop-ment. Ellul’s analysis had clear parallels with Martin Heidegger’s answer to the ques-

tion concerning technology, a lecture (and then essay) that also only reached a receptive

audience in the long 1960s.80

Before discussing how Ellul portrayed science’s relationship with technique, one

should highlight an aspect of his account that distinguishes it decisively from later

sociology of technology. Ellul is often held up as a straw man. His arguments, itis claimed, are as close as sophisticated arguments get to a position of technological

determinism. But this caricature depends on confusion between ‘technology’ and

‘technique’. Even if technology is understood broadly as the sum of material devices,know-how and the social systems within which they operate, technique was a still more

encompassing concept. Ellul would admit, although he was inconsistent on this point,

that humans could choose between technologies. But he dismissed outright thesuggestion that humans could reject technique: ‘Every rejection of a technique judged

to be bad entails the application of a new technique, the value of which is estimated

from the point of view of efficiency alone’ :81

The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice. Let no one say that man is theagent of technical progress … and that it is he who chooses among possible techniques. Inreality, he neither is nor does anything of the sort.82

This should be read as a statement of human impotence in the face of technique.Choosing technologies was a case of shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.

Ellul offered no way out, except by challenging individuals to strive to ‘transcend’

technique. This significant exception helps us understand why Ellul was read in the long1960s:

At stake is our very life, and we shall need all the energy, inventiveness, imagination, goodness,and strength we can muster to triumph in our predicament … [E]ach of us, in his own life,must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants …Wemust look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to

him to overcome necessity, and that this very act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dy-namic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won …In the modern world, the most dangerous form of determinism is the technological

phenomenon. It is not a question of getting rid of it, but, by an act of freedom, of transcendingit. How is this to be done? I do not yet know.83

80 ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ as a lecture dates from 1949. It was published in a collection of essays in1954.

81 Ellul, op. cit. (78), 110.

82 Ellul. op. cit. (78), 80.

83 Ellul, op. cit. (78), 32–3.

586 Jon Agar

It is not hard here to detect an echo of personalism, the communitarian philosophy

produced within 1930s Catholic theology that shaped Ellul’s early thinking and whichhas been claimed as a major influence on radical thought in the long 1960s.84

Ellul’s pessimism was therefore leavened by a glimpse of salvation. But human

‘choice’ between technologies was relegated to minor, negligible status. On this matterof choice, Ellul was utterly at odds with the new sociology of technology that developed

alongside the sociology of scientific knowledge in the 1970s and 1980s. This new soci-

ology can be characterized as providing, first and foremost, models of technologicalchange in which human choices are paramount, even if the capacity to choose is not

evenly distributed according to social justice. Such new models of technological change

could only become convincing in a new context after the long 1960s, in which choice, indifferent forms, became highly valorized.

So, finally, what role does Ellul assign to science? The answer is simple: ‘science has

become an instrument of technique’. ‘Science is becoming more and more subordinateto the search for technical application. ’85 Like all other human affairs, science had been

assimilated, an ‘enslavement’ that only became entrenched in the twentieth century.86

When Ellul called for ‘all of us’ to seek by ‘acts of freedom’ ways of transcendingtechnique, then he must also have been asking either for science’s emancipation or for

science, too, to be rejected in the name of a greater salvation.

The call to self-analysis and to ‘transcend’ the system was also the rousing conclusionto Marshall Berman’s historical examination of radical individualism and the emerg-

ence of modern society, The Politics of Authenticity (1971). Berman, a Harvard post-

graduate during the years of protest, concludes,

The system builds and programs everyone to order. Hence only an ‘underclass ’ which istotally ‘outside’ the system can even understand it, let alone work to change it. The chancesthat such an underclass will form are very dim; even if it should form, the chances are thatit will be co-opted [recall Ellul] … Hence the self can preserve itself only by totally droppingout – by withdrawing into the woods, or into madness, or into both – by living secret livesand creating invisible communities underground. Montesquieu and Rousseau suggest thateven in a thoroughly repressive society, there may be alternatives to the polarities of totalrevolution or total retreat. They argue that even though everyone is indeed conditioned by analienated social system, this conditioning may include a capacity to criticize and transcend thesystem.87

Berman had retreated two centuries and in the end described himself. The ‘modernsociety ’ whose emergence he traced was the society around him. Furthermore, what he

found through Rousseau and Montesquieu was an instruction to analyse oneself : ‘ the

very powers which enable us to see through others can enable us to see through our-selves ’.

84 This case for the influence of personalism in the long 1960s is advanced in J. J. Farrell, The Spirit of theSixties: Making Postwar Radicalism, London, 1997.85 Ellul, op. cit. (78), 10, 312.

86 Ellul, op. cit. (78), 45.

87 M. Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society,London, 1971, 323. Berman’s emphasis, but, again, the emphasis works here too.


This self-analysis mattered for science. Like Berman, Theodore Roszak spun ob-

servations of his contemporary, largely academic society into a call for a counter-cultural vanguard. In The Making of the Counter Culture (1968) Roszak suggested that

objectivity itself was mythological. This mattered, in his analysis, because the tech-

nocracy depended on experts who justified their role as being purveyors of reliableknowledge, while ‘reliable knowledge’ was knowledge that was ‘scientifically sound’

and science was characterized by ‘objectivity’. Working back up the chain of reasoning,

deny objectivity and you deny technocracy at its source.88 Roszak’s argument againstobjectivity was suggestive rather than compelling. From Kuhn he borrowed his scepti-

cism about seeing the history of science as the incremental accumulation of true

knowledge. He referred the reader to Michael Polanyi for the full challenge to objec-tivity. We are less concerned with where Roszak hoped the world was going, than with

what he said of the source of critique:

In the case of the counter culture, then, we have a movement which has turned from objectiveconsciousness as if from a place inhabited by plague – and in the moment of that turning, onecan just begin to see an entire episode in our cultural history, the great age of science andtechnology which began in the Enlightenment, standing revealed in all its quaint arbitrary,often absurd, and all too unbalanced aspects.89

The revolution he claimed to identify was one of consciousness, for it was ‘the psy-chology and not the epistemology of science that urgently requires our critical atten-

tion’.90 He illustrated the ‘objective consciousness ’ with a horror-show of an appendix.

The counter-culture was equipped for the role of critic of the objective consciousnessbecause, despite its diversity, both its main currents, the New Left activists and the

‘mind-blown bohemianism of the beats and hippies’, shared an ‘extraordinary per-

sonalism’, a ‘consciousness consciousness ’ that emphasized a politics of self-examin-ation.91

So in Roszak’s analysis the contribution of the New Left to the change of attitudes to

science and technology was indirect.92 An infantilized generation, made conscious ofitself through market effects and expanded higher education, developed a politics of

personalism that, by chance, would allow it effectively to oppose the greater evil ofscience-based technocracy. Roszak found the New Left’s personalism best expressed in

the SDS Port Huron Statement of 1962 that opposed ‘the depersonalisation that reduces

human beings to the status of things’, an alienation that ‘cannot be overcome by betterpersonnel management nor by improved gadgets but only when a love of man over-

comes the idolatrous worship of things by man’. Roszak reckoned this personalism

implied a devaluation of authority and hierarchy. He approvingly quoted Kenneth

88 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 208.

89 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 215.

90 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 217. What sorts of psychology is unclear. Perhaps something like C. T. Tort,

‘States of consciousness and state-specific sciences’, Science (1972), 176, 1203–10.91 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 56, 62.

92 Rose and Rose note how unconcerned with science were key authors of the British New Left such as

Raymond Williams and Perry Anderson: H. Rose and S. Rose, The Radicalisation of Science, London, 1976,13.

588 Jon Agar

Keniston of the Yale Medical School: ‘ in manner and style, these young radicals are

extremely ‘‘personalistic ’’, focussed on face-to-face, direct and open relationships withother people; hostile to formally structured roles and traditional bureaucratic patterns

of power and authority’, a characteristic Keniston traces to the child-rearing habits of

the contemporary middle-class family’.93 What was new in Roszak’s argument was theidentification of the counter-culture as vanguard and of science as its legitimate target.

Crucially, for Roszak, the 1960s self was produced as autonomous and self-examining,

perhaps also self-absorbed and self-interested. In generational terms, the effects of themarket and higher education intensified the 1960s generation’s consciousness of itself.94

Calls for self-management, notes Feenberg, were also a prominent feature of the events

of Paris in 1968.95

As practised in new ways in the long 1960s, the sociology of scientific knowledge was

another, most profound, expression of such self-analysis. The new sociology of science

argued that science’s content was open to sociological investigation. In the form ofBloor’s strong programme, the explicit intention was to turn the methods of science on

science itself. Yet when Frances Yates contrasted Giordano Bruno’s underground arts

of memory with the hierarchical methods of scholasticism, the society described wasinterpreted by readers as a long-1960s self-description, just as was the work of

Berman.96 Likewise, Commoner’s campaigns were projects orchestrated so that scien-

tists were organizing critically to observe science. Jerry Ravetz nailed this moment:industrialized science was provoking its ‘opposite, ‘‘critical science’’ ’, a ‘self-consciousand coherent force’.97 Finally, the new breed of science journalists, notably Greenberg,

helped others to analyse science scientifically. Steven Shapin recalls reading Greenberg,worrying about Vietnam and being moved to the place, intellectually, where the strong

programme started.98

Many commentators have observed that the new sociology of science emerged in thecontext of Wave Two, the social movements. Thus far the debate on this emergence has

been limited to definition of precisely which social movement was most productive. For

example, Haraway favours new environmentalism and feminism while Feenbergstresses the New Left and the Paris events.99 Other sources provide further examples.

Moore pinpoints sources of the critique in which it is claimed interests shaped contentas the publication of How Harvard Rules Women (1970) and in the arguments of

Commoner’s protean Greater St Louis Committee for Nuclear Intelligence against

93 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 60.

94 Roszak, op. cit. (33), 27.

95 ‘Self-management, one of the goals of this revolution.’ Feenberg, op. cit. (51), 39.

96 F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago, 1964; idem, The Art of Memory,Chicago, 1966.

97 J. R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems, Oxford, 1971, 10, 423, 424. My emphasis.

98 Read the fascinating but brief biographical sketch in Shapin’s introductory essay to D. S. Greenberg,

The Politics of Pure Science, 2nd edn, Chicago, 1999.99 ‘Donna Haraway argues that the emergence of new approaches owes much to the environmental and

feminist movements, and, I would add the contributions of thinkers such as Marcuse and Foucault … It is

ironic that the currently dominant social theory of technology seems to have no grasp of the political condi-

tions of its own credibility’. Feenberg, op. cit. (51), 12.


Edward Teller.100 Similarly, Nelkin’s The University and Military Research (1971) both

was clearly personal and emerged from the activism of the 1969 MIT Science ActionCoordinating Committee. Likewise, MIT’s Science and Public Policy programme

produced Anne Hessing Cahn’s Eggheads and Warheads: Scientists and the ABM(1971).

Likewise, we need to historicize the new sociology of technology. Feenberg finds that

the ‘movements of the 1960s created a context and an audience for the break with

technocratic determinism that had already begun in the theoretical domain in the worksof Mumford and a few other skeptical observers of the postwar scene’ and that it was

‘ in this context that an American school of philosophy of technology emerged’ (ex-

emplified by Winner, Borgmann and Ihde).101 Feenberg also notes that it is ‘ ironic ’ thatthe new sociology of technology has forgotten the politics of its birth. One could,

contentiously, suggest that the sociology of technology of the beginning of the long

1960s, typified by Ellul, most starkly differed from the sociology of technology emerg-ing at its end, notably the beginnings of the approach known as SCOT, in its account of

the roles available to groups and even individuals as choosers. Technological choice

became valorized.102 Technological logics, paths, trajectories, indeed anything stronglyconstrained or at limit determined, came to be ridiculed. Is it a coincidence that the

same period saw the political celebration of consumer choice, when Hayek’s

Individualism and Economic Order was read over Keynes?In his review of James Watson’s autobiographical account of the determination of the

structure of DNA, The Double Helix (1968), the biochemist Erwin Chargaff made the

pregnant remark that it is

perhaps not realized generally to what extent the ‘heroes’ of Watson’s book represent anew kind of scientist, and one that could hardly have been thought of before science became amass occupation, subject to, and forming part of, all the vulgarities of the communicationsmedia.103

We should take seriously Chargaff’s notice of a ‘new kind of scientist ’. Many com-

mentators noted that Watson’s protagonists behaved like ordinary human beings rather

than following some higher moral code that regulated scientists. But this was not whatChargaff meant. There are two separate questions: was Watson merely describing how

scientists behaved ‘in real life ’ for the first time? If so, what had changed about the

world so that Watson, in 1968, was able to be the first do this? The Double Helixcannot be read simply as an account of what ‘really ’ happened. As Jacob Bronowski

was quick to observe, the structure of the narrative resembles a fairy tale. Second, if

there was something new about how scientists behaved, what was it and why had itappeared in the post-war period? As Edward Yoxen has pointed out, one context was

100 Moore, op. cit. (45), 1615–16.

101 Feenberg, op. cit. (51), 6.102 Note that the processes whereby actors could highlight or downplay the roles of choice were complex

and need tracing in detail. Feenberg has given one case study in Commoner vs Ehrlich on population growth.

103 E. Chargaff, ‘A quick climb up Mount Olympus’ (review of The Double Helix), Science (1968), 159,1448–9.

590 Jon Agar

the fight for disciplinary recognition and power for emergent molecular biology. The

author ofWhat Is Life?, Erwin Schrodinger was one scientist enrolled as an ancestor togive 1960s molecular biology some genealogical substance.104 Likewise, Watson’s por-

trayal of his and Crick’s lifestyle was an invitation to recruits.

But the invention of ‘heroes’ invites the question of what exactly was being cham-pioned. Watson’s protagonists were individualistic, entrepreneurial and willing to bend

rules and slight colleagues to get ahead. They are a good illustration of what, counter-

intuitively, links Waves Two and Three. Marwick observed that individual culturalentrepreneurship was an underappreciated feature of the long 1960s. Such en-

trepreneurialism explains why new social movements, especially the counter-culture,

took the forms they did. Watson’s protagonists are from the same mould. (So are theprotagonists of the anti-IBM homebrew computer movements of the early and mid-

1970s, notably the Apple founders. The similarity is no coincidence.105) The exponent of

privately funded biotechnology Craig Venter was in California in his early twentieswhen he read The Double Helix. A recent hagiographical sketch significantly informs

us, ‘Years later Venter would complain that he had no mentors … If there was one, he

said, it was the Watson of The Double Helix.106 The point is not that the Watsonpersona stands in contrast to that of the cultural movers in the long 1960s. Rather, in

‘doing his own thing’, he is self-ishly similar.

Perhaps the long 1960s were more accurately typified by the coexistence and con-tradiction between such individualistic entrepreneurship and communal ideals.107

Indeed, such a tension is precisely what can be seen in the various first-hand narratives

of the DNA story. Watson gives us the individualist–entrepreneur. Maurice Wilkins’sThe Third Man of the Double Helix (2003) has belatedly reminded us of the communal

ideal.108 The communal model is old, and was captured if not frozen in its Cold War

form in Merton’s CUDOS norms. Just as the Balogh dynamic describes a thaw fromfixed private expert–expert relations to experts set against each other in public, so the

melting of Merton’s norms released a tide of individualism and entrepreneurialism

within the sciences. Watson provides just the models of behaviour, the ‘heroes’,necessary for 1970s commercialization in the biosciences. Wave Three provides the link

between the long 1960s and the DNA story and the entrepreneurial professors describedby Kenney.109

104 E. J. Yoxen, ‘Where does Schrodinger’s What Is Life? belong in the history of molecular biology?’,

History of Science (1979), 17, 17–52.105 J. Markoff,What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer

Industry, New York, 2005; F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, theWhole EarthNetwork, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago, 2006.

106 T. Anton, Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World, New York, 2000, 11. I use‘hagiography’ in its true sense: Anton presents us with ideally good lives.

107 Brick, op. cit. (2), makes contradiction the unifying theme for understanding the long 1960s.

108 M.Wilkins, The ThirdMan of the Double Helix, Oxford, 2003. Good X-ray pictures were the result of

‘The great community spirit and co-operation in our lab ’ (123–4). And elsewhere: ‘Francis and Jim asked mewhether I would mind if they started building models again. I found this question horrible. I did not like

treating science as a race, and I especially did not like the idea of them racing against me. I was stronglyattached to the idea of the scientific community ’ (205). My emphases.

109 Kenney, op. cit. (21).


What do we do with Chargaff’s substantive claim that the ‘new kind of scientist ’ was

a product of the development of science as a mass occupation? Watson’s protagonistswere useful fictions, useful in providing a semblance of individualism in a far less in-

dividualistic pursuit. Science was fully a part of what Brick labels the ‘socialization of

intellect in the new mass universities ’ and Watson’s individualistic self-portrait emergesas a means of resolving tensions.110 Another approach would be to do as Chargaff

suggests, to relate the processes of individualization and entrepreneurialism to devel-

opments in mass media. At least one highly popular if problematic sociological attemptto explain why Americans became more individualistic in the post-war period does

precisely that: the reason why Americans bowl alone, says Robert Putnam, was tele-

vision.111

Return to Friends House

We should not regard the new sociology of science as entirely a creature of Wave Two

or treat it as the product of one social movement rather than another. Instead, we

should recognize science studies as the result of an interference between Waves One,Two and Three. Wave One produced experts and created moments where divergent

expert views were publicly accessible. As Commoner observed, if faced with two con-

tradictory expert statements there is an alternative to the assumption that one expert istelling the truth and the other is not. One can instead question what both experts have

in common, a claim on truth. What happened next can be seen as another link in a

Wave One chain reaction, an institutional context that created a demand for furtherexperts: this time, experts on expertise. Wave Two provided the institutional vehicles

that could carry scrutiny. The BSSRS, the Social Impact of Modern Biology conference

and the edited proceedings were all examples of Wave Two phenomena that orche-strated and supported such an inquiry. Finally, Wave Three directed this inquiry in-

wards. The geneticist Jon Beckwith had flown from Berkeley, home of Roszak’s

‘consciousness consciousness ’, to provide testimony on the ‘scientist in opposition inthe United States ’.112 Citing the Nature editorial of 27 December 1969, Beckwith noted

that (as we might now expect from Wave One) it was publicly visible expert conflict

that created intense establishment discomfort :

The reactions to our statements were strong and bitter from some quarters. There was anoutcry from many scientists against publicizing any negative aspects of our work. They feltthat the problems and control of science were better handled quietly by leaders of the scientificcommunity.

110 Brick, op. cit. (2), 16.111 I am only being superficially simplistic. A close analysis of the structure of Putnam’s argument shows

that he argues that the effects of television were pivotal: R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revivalof American Community, New York, 2000.

112 J. Beckwith, ‘The scientist in opposition in the United States’, in Fuller, op. cit. (10), 225–31.

592 Jon Agar

In consequence, Beckwith argued that in

the same way that radical historians or economists expose the way in which most history oreconomics is taught from a political viewpoint supportive of the system, the radical scientistmust expose the way in which science … is politically organised and directed.113

The inner workings of science must be revealed. Wave Three was also evident, as we

will now show, in the astounding speeches by Bronowski and Young.

The key presentation by the establishment scientists was Jacob Bronowski’s proposalfor the ‘disestablishment of science’. Director of the Council of Biology in Human

Affairs at the Salk Institute and at that moment planning and shooting footage for thecelebrated documentary series The Ascent of Man, Bronowski began by labelling calls

for ‘a moratorium on science’ as the ‘favoured daydream of the bewildered citizen’.

But behind this dream was something more profound, recognition of the importance of‘a voluntary agreement among scientists themselves’ : ‘ If science is to express a con-

science ’, argued Bronowski, it must be self-generated, ‘ it must come spontaneously out

of the community of scientists ’. In particular, scientists were ‘face to face with a choiceof conscience between two moralities : the moralities of science, and the morality of

national and government power’. These moralities, stated Bronowski, were ‘not com-

patible’. Government patronage of the sciences led to ‘moral distortion, a readiness touse any means for its own ends’ :

The scientist who goes into this jungle of 20th-century government, anywhere in the world,puts himself at a double disadvantage. In the first place, he does not make policy; he does noteven help to make it, and most of the time he has no idea what shifts of policy his advice ismeant to serve. And in the second and, oddly, the more serious place (for him) he has nocontrol over the way in which what he says in council will be presented to the public. I call thismore serious for him, because public respect for science is built on his intellectual integrity,and the second-hand statements and the garbled extracts that are attributed to him bring himinto disrepute.

Experts disagreed with experts in public, said Bronowski, because of misrepresentation

by and of government bodies. He offered his solution: ‘The time has come to consider

how we might bring about a separation, as complete as possible, between science andgovernment in all countries. I call this the disestablishment of science. ’ By rolling back

the state in science in the name of restoring the autonomy, the self-determination, of

science, Bronowski’s programme would deliver science to private interests. His argu-ment is a clear example of how sea-change rhetoric could prepare the ground for the

commercialization of the life sciences in the 1970s. Notice the grounds of the argument

in the Wave One problem of public statements by experts bringing scientists ‘ intodisrepute’.114 Furthermore, the resources necessary for Bronowski to make this argu-

ment came from Wave Two in the BSSRS as organizers and audience. Bronowski’s

Council for Biology in Human Affairs at the Salk Institute had stumped up the cash forthe conference. He had paid his way in. Notice, too, the flurry of Wave Three notions

113 Beckwith, op. cit. (112), 226–7, 228.

114 J. Bronowski, ‘The disestablishment of science’, in Fuller, op. cit. (10), 233–43, 233, 234, 238, 239,

241.


such as self-analysis, self-determination and autonomy. Bronowski’s argument finds

echoes in one recent, sophisticated study of science as an ideological and political re-source. Ezrahi has claimed that a disestablishment of science did indeed take place in

the long 1960s and that a wave of reflexivity acted to decouple political action from

science as an exemplar of rationality in liberal democracies.115 Thus the Ascent of Manconnects to the Descent of Icarus.

Bronowski infuriated the radicals on the conference floor. ‘ I think we’ve just heard a

prize example of liberal clap-trap’, said one. Rosenhead turned Bronowski’s argumentsaround: it was not individual integrity that was at issue but the irresponsibility of

institutions. Radicals and establishment scientists heard and praised different aspects of

the conference. Bronowski’s talk may have been the one that the ‘national press ’ choseto ‘headline’, noted an editorial in the BSSRS Newssheet in early 1971, but the most

‘eagerly-awaited’ was the paper by a historian of science, Robert M. Young.116 It was

also by far the most divisive.117 In ‘Evolutionary biology and ideology: then and now,Young started from the same observation as Monod, Wilkins and Bohm: ‘We are

struggling to integrate science and values’ but ‘at the same time we are prevented from

doing so by our most basic assumptions’. There followed a masterclass in the newsociology of science: facts are theory-laden, concepts are value-laden, ‘knowledge is

both a product of social change and a major factor in social change and/or the oppo-

sition to it ’. ‘This ’, noted Young, was a ‘commonplace’ (for some), ‘but its systematicapplication has radical consequences for the idea of ‘‘objective’’ science’. A sharp

analysis of three case studies followed. The essential point, though, was that

no one can confidently draw the line between fact, interpretation, hypothesis, and speculation(which may itself be fruitful). It seems to me that it is the social responsibility of science toenter wholeheartedly into this debate and directly answer such works in the non-specialistpress. Paradoxically, we must relax the authority of science and see it in an ideological per-spective in order to get nearer the will-o’-the-wisp of objectivity. We have won a Pyrrhicvictory in establishing the part-reality and part-myth of the autonomy and objectivity of sci-ence, and the existence of this Society and its conflicting aims reflects our unsteady position. Inone sense science should feel strong enough to stop flailing horses which died in the nineteenthcentury in their attempts to protect the status and methods of science. But in an other sense, weneed – for our own moral purposes – to think seriously about the metaphysics of science,about the philosophy of nature, of man and of society, and especially about the ideologicalassumptions which underlie, constrain and are fed by science.118

115 Y. Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy,Cambridge, MA, 1990.

116 BSSRS Newsheet, 1971, 10. The Newssheet was turned later into the journal Science for People. Forcomment on Science for People and Undercurrents see J. R. Ravetz, ‘Anti-establishment science in some

British journals’, in Counter-movements in the Sciences (ed. H. Nowotny and H. Rose), Sociology of theSciences (1979) 3, 27–37.117 Jon Beckwith’s paper pleased the radicals most, being reportage and reflections on the Berkeley ex-

perience. The Roses, too, drew on Kuhn, Marcuse and the Wave Two movements to demolish the ‘myth of

neutrality of science’. But it was Young’s paper which electrified the conference. S. Rose and H. Rose, ‘Themyth of the neutrality of science’, in Fuller, op. cit. (10), 215–24. Beckwith, op. cit. (112). See also J. Beckwith,

Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science, Cambridge, MA, 2002.

118 R. M. Young, ‘Evolutionary biology and ideology: then and now’, in Fuller, op. cit. (10), 199–213,

201, 203, 211.

594 Jon Agar

The programme for the new sociology of science was here mapped out. Furthermore, as

Young notices, the diversity of accounts of what was happening with science in the long1960s, as exemplified by the BSSRS (‘the existence of this Society and its conflicting

aims reflects our unsteady position’), was what prompted the turn inwards to ask for a

sociology of scientific content. In a powerful sense, then, sociology of scientificknowledge was self-description. This is a line of inquiry that has already begun.

Schaffer, for example, has suggested that Kuhn’s Structure can also be seen as a de-

scription of his immediate intellectual context.119 We may also recall that ‘crisis talk’was a feature both of the subject of Paul Forman’s path-breaking study of Weimar

physics and of the context of science studies in the long 1960s.120 We must understand

Wave Three in order to historicize SSK and vice versa.

Conclusion

There are powerful reasons for not making a fuss about the transition from the sixties to theseventies a few days from now. For one thing, time is known to be continuous. For another,attempts artificially to separate one interval from another usually stimulate exaggeration oroversimplification … The truth is that there have emerged in public opinion of science andtechnology a group of interlocking heresies … 121

Editorial, ‘On which side are the angels?’, Nature (1969), 224, 1241–2

In the closing days of the 1960s, the editors of Nature chose to attack a fearful array of

‘ interlocking heresies ’, prominent among them the ‘pollution movement ’, the‘Doomsday Fallacy’ and any linkage of ‘fears about genetic engineering with the

widespread anxiety about the war in Vietnam’. ‘Why’, they plaintively asked, ‘ is there

such currency in these fantasies?’ As it happens, a particular fantasy they hoped to ‘givethe lie to’ was global warming through the greenhouse effect. What made matters much

worse, in the editors’ eyes, was that this critique was self-generated and self-sustained:

the ‘fact that many professional scientists have recently been contributing to this mis-guided assessment of the risks of modern life is reprehensible’.

TheNature editors knew something was happening but did not in truth know what it

was. Their rivals over at Science also ran editorials that consoled the journal’s readersthat any supposed ‘crisis in confidence in science’ might be just a matter of ‘ambiv-

alence, not rejection’, while doubting both the data and the phenomenon.122 Are we in a

better position to know what happened about science in the long 1960s? What can wesay that avoids exaggeration and oversimplification?

This paper has offered a three-wave model which together captures something of thelong 1960s as a period of ‘sea change’. While I have taken as a case study a handful of

papers from just one conference, evidence for the three waves is drawn from a diverse

119 S. Schaffer, paper for STS Workshop, Cambridge HPS, 2 March 2006.

120 P. Forman, ‘Weimar culture, causality and quantum theory, 1918–1927’, Historical Studies in thePhysical Sciences (1971), 3, 1–115.121 This editorial was a direct response to a letter published in the same issue from Jim Shapiro, Larry Eron

and Jon Beckwith.

122 Etzioni and Nunn, op. cit. (19); Nunn, op. cit. (26).


secondary literature that had not hitherto been fully brought together. Wave One de-

scribed an institutional dynamic that drew out experts from closed and hidden dis-agreement into situations where expert disagreement was open to public scrutiny. This

‘Balogh model ’ also accounted for the multiplication of experts. Wave Two consisted

of institutions and audiences that could carry public scrutiny and provide a home forsea-change cultures. In particular, Wave Two could provide stage, audience and theatre

directors for the play of disagreeing experts. The writings of activist–scientists and new

critical journalism also helped. A necessary condition for public ‘ambivalence’ aboutscience was that both sides were publicly presented. Wave Three was marked by an

orientation towards the self, in diverse ways. Acknowledgement of this self-regard re-

solves some paradoxical features of this topic. For example, many commentatorsidentified changing attitudes towards science with the ‘young’, while polling data

suggested that ‘young people’ were ‘not the main source of lack of confidence’.123 But

there is little doubt that the baby-boom generation were more reflexive, more likely toexamine themselves, their cohort, their society, and therefore more likely to articulate

and consume self-analysis, even if they were not on average more critical.

All three waves need to be framed in the Cold War context. The polarized geopol-itical world provided a common container for all sea-change phenomena. The Cold

War provided the freeze that formed a common origin for the Balogh-style chain re-

actions. The influence of the Cold War on social movements went far beyond the ob-vious provision of targets, such as nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War, against

which to organize. Cold War culture and institutions, such as containment, consensus,

conformity, extraordinary arsenals of science-based technological systems, and hier-archies of systems were, in a powerful sense, the ocean on which the three waves

moved. More specifically, the Cold War shaped the sea change by encouraging the

development of techniques that, when turned inwards, became instruments of critique.Sometimes this critique was played out within the sciences, as when Cold War

oceanographic data provided ammunition for the plate tectonics revolution.124

Sometimes the critique was played out on a more traditionally political stage.Cybernetics, for example, contributed its core techniques, the analysis of feedback

loops, to the models used by the Club of Rome to identify the limits to growth. JamesLovelock built his technical authority on the development of ionization detectors

for gas chromatography, which attracted patronage from NASA, before he spent

this intellectual capital on promulgating Gaia. The Cold War provided the newenvironmentalism with critical tools. Even as simple a move as the invention of a new

self-critical term, ‘big science ’, partly originated in the reflections of Alvin Weinberg,

an administrator of a central laboratory of the Cold War, Oak Ridge, as well as inDerek de Solla Price’s science of science.125 Or, shifting fields again, RAND techniques

for assessing the management of research and development contributed to a critique of

123 Etzioni and Nunn, op. cit. (19); original emphasis. The older, the less educated, and, in the UnitedStates, the further south you were, the less confidence in science you had.

124 Brick, op. cit. (2), 9.

125 J. H. Capshew and K. A. Rader, ‘Big science: Price to the present’, Osiris (1992) 7, 3–25; P. Galison

and B. Hevly (eds.), Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, Stanford, 1992.

596 Jon Agar

top-down hierarchical centralized authority.126 Radical variants of technocratic tools

were proposed.127

Hollinger’s explanation for the ‘ little renaissance of ‘‘science studies ’’ ’ of 1962 to

1965 is a special case of this general argument.128 Hollinger notes the remarkable

flourishing of communitarian language about science found in the work of, amongstothers, Don K. Price, Warren O. Hagstrom and, pre-eminently, Thomas Kuhn’s

Structure. Scientific communities were, of course, not new. But the emphasis on

‘scientific community’ as a representation of science, replacing older individualistimages, was innovative. The switch in representations, argues Hollinger, happened

because of the ‘revolutionizing of the political economy of physical science’. The rise of

big science confirmed in the Cold War encouraged talk of ‘scientific community’ notbecause science was more communal but because its precarious autonomy could better

be defended. Hence emerged what Hollinger calls ‘ laissez-faire communitarianism’:

science is a self-managing community, so let it be. Likewise, Brick argues that thecondition of the socialization of the intellect, the organization of intellectual life in

formal institutions relying on public funds and engaged with public policy formation,

provoked questions about the consequences of socialization for knowledge.129 But ifscience were a community then did it not therefore have communal responsibilities?

This was precisely the line of thinking that led to bodies such as the BSSRS.

Critical voices were therefore partly generated from within the Cold War establish-ment, a feature noticed by several of the commentators previously discussed such as

Jacob Bronowski, the Nature editors and Maurice Wilkins. In his review of the rela-

tions of science, social movements and the long 1960s, Mendelsohn has also empha-sized the stranger linkages and sympathies that made and crossed the oppositional

culture. Thus Lewis Mumford’s despairing The Pentagon of Power (1970) found critics

in conservative historians such as Gerald Holton, and is contrasted to the upbeat op-timistic portrayal of technology in Harvard’s Technology and Society programme,

funded by IBM to the tune of one million dollars. But Mumford’s jeremiad shared

concerns with Eisenhower’s military–industrial complex speech, the president’s fare-well address to the nation of January 1961, which in turn echoed C. Wright Mills’s

arguments in the Power Elite (1956), hardly a political bedfellow of Eisenhower.130

Critical science exemplars were Commoner’s St Louis group and the societies for social

responsibility in science. As previously shown, Commoner’s Science and Survival

126 D. Hounshell, ‘The Cold War, RAND, and the generation of knowledge, 1946–1962’, HistoricalStudies in the Physical and Biological Sciences (1997), 27, 237–67, 257.127 Including a ‘Guerrilla’ and ‘alternative Operational Reseach’: ‘ the current techniques of OR can be

turned to the use of sections of the community threatened by the OR currently used by the dominantforces … One can speculate on the development of an OR that doesn’t view people in a quantifiable ab-

stracted form’. C. Thunhurst, ‘Radical OR?’, Science for People (1974), 25, 10–11. An Institute of Critical

Operational Research was planned – and a journal, OR?gasm.

128 Hollinger, op. cit. (8), 99–110.129 Brick, op. cit. (2), 23.

130 Mendelsohn notes the immediate, local context of Eisenhower’s speech: Eisenhower had been hoping

for a nuclear test-ban treaty but had been thwarted by manoeuvres by ‘newly powerful scientists (Edward

Teller is the obvious figure) … aided by friends in the military’. Mendelsohn, op. cit. (1), 156.


(1966) was self-directed in the sense that it recognized the need for a study of the study

of science in the outcome of Balogh-type processes : experts publicly disagreeing withexperts. Ravetz’s ‘self-conscious’ ‘critical science’ is also a good illustration of how

Wave Three concerns were produced by Wave Two interactions.

For the generation growing up in the 1960s, the images of science were ‘contradic-tory’. The generation were free to enjoy benefits (domestic technologies, ‘high-tech

music ’, synthetic drugs) while consuming critical texts (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Carson,

Ehrlich, Commoner, Illich, Schumacher) and recognizing the ‘ loss of innocence’ ofscience made vivid by anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam movements. Howard Brick has

emphasized how contradiction was a feature of much of what was distinctive about the

long 1960s. Likewise, the notion of a sea change formed by the interference of threewaves captures the otherwise contradictory aspects of the long 1960s identified by

Mendelsohn and Ravetz: short-term turmoil, a feeling of profound movement, a sense

of failure.131 ‘The sixties’ may have been a short-lived phenomenon,132 but the wavesthat interfered to produce them cannot be confined to one place or one time.

For us the outcome of the interference of Waves One, Two and Three in a self-

conscious study of science (to which we have given many names) is the closest to home.Participants at the time noticed that analyses of science had passed from use–abuse

models, in which a ‘good science ’ was distinguished and preserved from a ‘bad sci-

ence’, to models of how the content of scientific knowledge, good, bad or otherwise,was related to context. In the interference betweenWave Two andWave Three we have

an explanation of this passage. As Moore has shown us, Wave Two encouraged the

formation of separate bodies to preserve the purity of bodies of the scientific estab-lishment. In Wave Three the institutional pressures to preserve purity of the kind that

Moore has pinpointed were overcome. It became possible to talk beyond the use–abuse

model. A science of science was encouraged. Self-analysis moved to consider the con-tent of science. In the case of the Social Impact of Modern Biology conference, a speech

such as Young’s was articulable.

There are other ways of historicizing the emergence of a new study of science.Jamison and Eyerman stress continuity between the 1930s and long-1960s radical cri-

tiques, a continuity dependent on a fragile chain of torch-bearers: C. Wright Mills,Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Fairfield Osborn, Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson and

Leo Szilard.133 Likewise, Steven and Hilary Rose charge that the radical idea that the

content of science might be social in character had been suppressed by the mobilizationfor war.134 The reactions to the Bomb and to Lysenkoism had encouraged an ideology

131 Both Mendelsohn and Ravetz tot up a record of some successes (environmental regulation, women’s

‘self-health’ movements, alternative medicines) but more failures (the withering of the societies for socialresponsibility in science, alternative technology).

132 Indeed, the Smithsonian Institution housed a Center for Short-lived Phenomena – a Wave Three enti-

ty – which collected and compared data on short-lived phenomena (earthquakes, oil spills, sudden declines in

puffin populations, infestations of vermin). It produced a few permanent records, such as The Pulse of thePlanet (1972), before disappearing. The Center for Short-lived Phenomena was itself a short-lived phenom-

enon.

133 Jamison and Eyerman, op. cit. (48).

134 Rose and Rose, op. cit. (92).

598 Jon Agar

of science as neutral. Only with the thawing of this mid-century freeze, glossed as a

loosening of the ties that bound science to the state, could an alternative ideologyemerge. (Notice the parallel withWave One.) Such accounts frame the long 1960s as the

return of submerged 1930s attitudes.

Another interpretation of the sea change would see it as a transition from a pre-ference for pyramidal models of organization to network models, from centralized

command to distributed agency without ‘exaggeration and over-simplification’. We are

faced with partial accounts with enough similarities to suggest the need for a general,synthetic history. The available robust accounts appeal to specific causes such as the

transition from centralized hierarchies to dispersed networks in social structures,

architecture, computer technology and defence organization;135 the fall from favour ofthe large centralized firm in favour of the flexible network of firms;136 the challenge to

doctors’ authority from ‘self-help’ social movements;137 the retreat of government from

the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy; and the expansion of the market.138 For any‘node’ – whether a self-treating patient, a node in the ARPANET, a firm responding

flexibly or a consumer – to act autonomously was also to self-analyse and self-direct.

Many of these phenomena were crises in some form of reproduction, not only as re-production of a generation, workforce or university-educated cadre, but also repro-

ductive crises in the sense that the debate over the Pill marked a reproductive crisis.139

Just as autopoiesis was being named as a scientific subject, the re-creation of the selfseemed problematic. My hypothesis is that these processes all share the features of

Wave Three.

Wave Three is the least clearly delineated by historians and also the one thatstrikes closest to home for sociologists of science and technology and for the historians

of science alongside whom they have worked. Waves One, Two and particularly

Three opened an intellectual space for the sociology of scientific knowledge. Theidentification of Wave Three immediately opens up a series of historical research topics

that can now be seen as part of a wider whole. How can the changing sciences of

selfhood – such as immunology, genetics as informed by triumphant molecular biology,or psychology – be understood as part of these broader changes? In computing and in

135 Note Talcott Parsons’s observations on the creation of ‘networks of solidarity on much more highlyuniversalistic bases than kinship’ discussed in Brick, op. cit. (2), 118. P. Galison, ‘War against the center’,

Grey Room (2001), 4, 5–33.

136 Cf. M. J. Piore and C. F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, New York,1984.

137 Cf. S. B. Ruzek, The Women’s Health Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control, New

York, 1978.

138 The term is, of course, Lenin’s but was recalled recently in D. Yergin and J. Stanislaw, TheCommanding Heights: The Battle between Government and the Marketplace that Is Remaking the ModernWorld, New York, 1998, unsatisfying because it presents a Keynesian history of the transition from Keynes to

Hayek (a few wise heads belatedly chose Hayek), whereas what is needed is a truly Hayekian history of the

transition from Keynes to Hayek (that is to say, history which is the product of many, in which the wisechoices of the few do not guide history).

139 Furthermore, they were crises in reproduction of forms, such as the hierarchical corporation, or the

modern university, that stabilized in the late nineteenth century. The long 1960s, of course, have also been

seen as a crisis in Enlightenment forms.


governance, the long 1960s saw a convulsive and otherwise puzzling debate over priv-

acy. Does this debate now make sense when set in a broader context? In religion, insome but not all countries, the long 1960s were the period of dechristianization.140 This

is often glossed, inWave Two-type analyses, as part of wider patterns of opposition and

distrust of authority. But what should we make of the parallels with science?Quantitative evidence reported by Science, for example, held that the ‘falling away

from science’ was ‘part of a general lessening of faith in American institutions and

authorities rather than a major anti-science groundswell … from religion to the mili-tary, from the press to major US companies [a]ppreciation for all of them, without

exception, has fallen’.141

To answer any of these questions we will need to revisit what happened to ‘auth-ority ’, the ‘self ’, ‘choice’ and the ‘ individual ’ in the long 1960s.142 We will need to

conduct an intensively cross-national comparative study to unpick accounts of Wave

Two. Explanatory factors often proposed, such as the VietnamWar, vary immensely inmeaning and significance between cultures. We knowmuch more about the convulsions

on American campuses than we do about the similarly intense episodes in Japan.143 We

will need to consider contrarian arguments (‘ there was no crisis in science in the1960s’). We will need to reassess the New Right as well as the New Left. We will need

to jettison some received associations, such as entrepreneurship with the political right

and, perhaps, sociology of scientific knowledge as an inherently politically progressiveproject. And we will need to treat many secondary sources as primary sources.

140 C. G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, London,2001.

141 Etzioni and Nunn, op. cit. (19).

142 The literature on Western individualism is itself vast in scope. See T. C. Heller et al. (eds.),

Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, Stanford, 1986.R. N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley, 1985.And, lest we forget, F. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, London, 1949.143 B. Burnett, ‘Locating historical understanding of Japanese andWestern resistance in education’, paper

at AARE 2004 conference, Melbourne.

600 Jon Agar

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What happened in the sixties?

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